Aspiring Animal Artist

redvanda

Hi guys,

This is my first thread on polycount and it has been long overdue!

I want to go into a particularly niche subject matter, and that is animals.

I have uploaded some renders and would appreciate any feedback, and suggestions on other animals would be equally awesome!

Joost

Cool animals! The tiger looks a bit chubby in that shot. I'm not sure if there's a big market for animal artists. It might be good to diversify a little bit.

RobeOmega

Humans are animals too

Stockwell

Robeomega wrote: »

Humans are animals too

+1

komaokc wrote:

I'm not sure if there's a big market for animal artists. It might be good to diversify a little bit.

+1


Being able to make animals is great, pulling off fur and and that good jazz is pretty cool stuff, and your skull sculpt is fantastic, I love the surface detail on it!

But i'm also not sure how far you could get into games trying to sell yourself as an animal artist. Have a few characters, it's not like you can't turn an animal into a playable character, and some realistic animals is fine too, but i'd start calling yourself a character artist. and, do some characters too

Nice work though!

EDIT: This is the kind of stuff I mean, not to mention so many other games have animal characters. This is from a friend of mine, I hope she doesn't mind me showing this.



She's got more of that too, but you'll be able to find all sorts of concepts, and stylized or not, you can still use realistic elements from your animals into a character, anatomy, fur, etc.

Good luck! Hope this helps "aspiring" become "currently".

silvershrimp

Yeah everything said on here is fair. Niche can be good, maybe too tight a niche for games (Anyone skilful enough to make a good character can make an animal, how many studios in your desired region are big enough to need an animal artist?) but theres other possibilities, like vfx etc.
If I was you i'd show some muscle sculpts on skeletons, some monsters or fantasy creatures to show your range.
I'd show some skilful skin and scales to go with the nice fur and bone.
Drop the second treefrog, it looks silly to have a scaled version of the first frog. That seagull texture is weak as well, so i'd retire that piece.

I like the tiger, refine the render materials on his eyes and nose, get some more shading on the fur and it'd be much nicer.
Good stuff.

RobeOmega

You would never (Or I have not seen at least) see a animal artist position because they expect you to do them as a character artist. The only reason you would really get hired as only a animal artist is if you were working in a BIG studio with lots of animals in the game enough to keep your full time for a few years. Even then the only reason they would hire you other a character artist is if your animals were MUCH better than they can do remember your competition for these jobs will be able to do animals AND characters which is more than you appear to be putting on the table. They could also say "Oh we have a small budget but we want some animals oh here is a guy he has good animals but since he can not do humans we can get away with giving him more hours and less pay". Also expect to be the first to be layed off after the game is finished if they are not jumping straight into another project which requires lots of animals.

Sorry this is not actually critique on the actual models although that skull sculpt looks cool

NegevPro

I'd have to agree with Robeomega, but your work is great. That skull sculpt is incredible!

Justin Meisse

silvershrimp wrote: »

Yeah everything said on here is fair. Niche can be good, maybe too tight a niche for games (Anyone skilful enough to make a good character can make an animal

I've seen soooooo many bad animals in big games. Sure, I don't think there's room for an animal artist at a studio but there's a possibility of it working out for a freelancer. Plus, most monsters are animals.

Noren

I'd say you're off to a good start.
I like the skull the best, but while it looks decent at a first glance, which is good enough for most of the games out there, and you seem to be in control of the tools, it's not as accurate as it could be, especially for a study.
Try to imagine where the muscles would be running and connecting to the bone, like between the jaw and the skull, look at a lot of references (but pick one as your main influence, if you find a good one) and try to get a feeling for how certain structures look in general, like again where muscles connect to the bone and shaped it, an eye-socket etc. It's basically the same structures over and over, just adapted to different forms, so it pays off to sit down and really nail it a couple of times.
It's all kind of there already, but just kind of.

redvanda

Apologies for the delayed response,

All your feedback is all hugely helpful and I will be starting off the next few projects by doing studies of human anatomy and maybe try human, or human style characters to show I can do them.

Thank you for the feedback on the skull, the kind words are really nice I really enjoyed that project in particular and was great to try and do a detailed study, trying to understand its form and figure out how each part works.

@komaokc I can kind of see what you mean, I may have bulked up the shape a bit, and I also see that the pose is a bit stiff, so Im gonna do more full scale animals.

@Robeomega and @Stockwell I will be trying human forms for a bit, it will be challenging! And that concept piece is awesome, I will be looking at her portfolio for some inspiration. Would love to make some of that stuff. Also, in regards to your second post Robeomega, I have had chats with my teacher and he did say also that kind of thing. Would be cool to get into a studio doing generic things, then they ask if I know any animal artists for a project and I can swoop in XD In my ideal world anyway haha!

@silvershrimp I see what you mean, I may put the seagull in as a prop for an environment piece instead of having it as an animal on its own, and yeah the second frog does look a bit too samey now I look at it.

@NegevPro Thank you and I agree too

@Justin Meisee Yeah I was thinking of doing some monsters... so Ill look a bit more into that instead of neglecting it, first try humans and see how that goes

@Noren That is a very valid response. Was thinking of going into 3D coat at some point and trying out the muscle tool in there as well as Zbrush. Would love to do a study from bone to muscle to skin. This is a start so hopefully I will improve with the next ones, I shall keep you posted!

redvanda

I don't know if you have seen but I have finished another project. It is not an animal or human, and it was a request for someone's project.

I created a scorpion to steer away from the cutesy, normal animals, and make a break in my portfolio to make something a little more dramatic and interesting. Here are some posts!





I also have a model on Verold but I can't seem to integrate it. Here is the link anyway.

http://studio.verold.com/projects/534d99247553f9020000016f